Calculate your true cost of sale, customer acquisition cost and gross margin, then see your spend broken down by category with practical ways to bring it down.
Takes ~3 minutes · All figures stay in your browser until you choose to share them
Acquisition Cost
What each customer costs
Cost Breakdown
Where the money goes
Indicative Context
Rough industry reference
Recommendations
Where to optimise
Most owners know what a customer is worth, but far fewer know what one actually costs to win. The true cost of sale is scattered across the business — marketing agencies and ad spend, content, events and outsourced lead generation, plus sales salaries, commissions, CRM tools, training and travel. Because these sit in different budgets and different people's heads, they rarely get added up and compared against the revenue they produce. The result is that acquisition cost creeps, margin quietly erodes, and there's no clear view of which part of the spend is doing the work. This calculator pulls the whole picture together so you can see, in one place, what it really costs you to turn a lead into a paying customer.
You enter your annual figures — revenue, customers won, and optionally leads and proposals — then your marketing costs (spend, advertising, content, events, lead generation) and sales costs (salaries, commissions, CRM and tools, training, travel). From your own numbers it totals your cost of sale and works out your customer acquisition cost, cost per lead and cost per proposal, your average deal size, your cost of sale as a percentage of revenue, and the gross margin left after that spend. It also maps your funnel — lead-to-proposal and proposal-to-close conversion — and breaks your total spend down by category so you can see where the money actually goes. To give context, it places your headline metrics against rough, order-of-magnitude reference points for the industry you select; these are deliberately labelled indicative estimates for a sense-check, not published averages or survey benchmarks. Finally it surfaces plain-English recommendations flagging where your spend or conversion looks out of balance.
Australian SME owners, founders and finance leads who want a clear, honest read on what it costs to win a customer and where that spend can be tightened.
The short answers are here. For anything else, ask below or get in touch.
Cost of goods sold (COGS) is what it costs to deliver the product or service you sold — materials, direct labour, delivery. Cost of sale, as this tool uses it, is what it costs to win the customer in the first place: your combined marketing and sales investment. This calculator focuses on that acquisition side, so its gross margin figure is the margin left after sales and marketing spend, which is why you should read it alongside your delivery costs rather than as a full profit figure.
Use these results to make better decisions. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on them, an advisor can walk through what they mean for the business.
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